Details

Description

TokenSources.java, in the highlight module, is a facade that returns a TokenStream for a field by either un-inverting & converting the TermVector Terms, or by text re-analysis if TermVectors are unavailable or don't have the right options. TokenSources is used by the default highlighter, which is the most accurate highlighter we've got. When documents are large (say hundreds of kilobytes on up), I found that most of the highlighter's activity was up-front spent un-inverting & converting the term vector to a TokenStream, not on the actual/real highlighting that follows. Much of that time was on a huge sort of hundreds of thousands of Tokens. Time was also spent doing lots of String conversion and char copying, and it used a lot of memory, too.

In this patch, I overhauled TokenStreamFromTermPositionVector.java, and I removed similar logic in TokenSources that was used in circumstances when positions weren't available but offsets were. This class can un-invert term vectors that have positions and/or offsets (at least one). It doesn't sort. It places Tokens directly into an array of tokens directly indexed by position. When positions aren't available, the startOffset/8 is a substitute. I've got a more light-weight Token inner class used in place of the former and deprecated Token that ultimately forms a linked-list when the process is done. There is no string conversion; character copying is minimized. The Token array is GC'ed after initialization, it's only needed during construction.

Misc:

It implements reset() efficiently so it need not be wrapped in CachingTokenFilter (I'll supply a patch later on this).

It only fetches payloads if you ask for them by adding the attribute (the default highlighter won't add the attribute).

It exposes the underlying TermVector terms via a getter too, which is needed by another patch to follow later.

A key assumption is that the position increment gap or first position isn't gigantic, as that will create wasted space and the linked-list formation ultimately has to visit all the slots. We also assume that there aren't a ton of tokens at the same position, since inserting new tokens in sorted order is O(N^2) where 'N' is the average co-occurring token length.

My performance testing using Lucene's benchmark module on a megabyte document showed >5x speedup, in conjunction with some other patches to be posted separately. This patch made the most difference.